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The purpose of this paper is to provide language and meaning to open up silence around traumatic boarding school memories through the symbolic aura (Nora 1989) surrounding key memory objects. The secondary aim is to illustrate to historians the importance of paying attention to interviewees’ discussion of material objects as clues to uncovering deeper, unexplored memories.

The approach draws on Vamik Volkan’s (2006) understanding of “linking objects” – significant objects preserved or created by traumatised people. Traumatic emotions become linked with loss and grief associated with the object, turning it into a tightly packed symbol whose significance is “bound up in the conscious and unconscious nuances of the relationship that preceded the loss” (Volkan, 2006, p. 255). The experiences of the two authors are examined as exemplars in this process.

The exemplars illustrate how complicated and long term the process of remembering and understanding is for those who experience boarding school trauma and the power of “linking objects” to open up memory surrounding it. The case studies also alert educational historians to how emotionally fraught revealing what happened can be and how long it may take to confront the events.

Linking objects have not previously been used in relationship to surfacing boarding school trauma. The paper is also unique in offering deep analysis of boarding school trauma undertaken by skilled educational researchers who incorporate reflections from their own experience informed by broad theory and pertinent psychological research.

Together with increasing ambiguity and frequency of changes, management becomes full of seemingly conflicting choices, i.e. paradoxes, coming up in the process of decision-making. Successful management of paradoxes, i.e. treating them as “both/and” constructs leads to innovative solutions and better overall organizational performance. In response to a significant research gap regarding antecedents of managing paradoxes, the aim of the paper is to investigate how individual characteristics of strategic decision-makers, specifically their age, tenure and educational background, affect the ability to combine contradictions in their strategic choices.

An empirical study was conducted among 201 managers representing furniture companies in Poland. The CATI technique with an interview questionnaire was adopted in order to identify respondents' opinions on the main features, traits and dimensions of the strategy implemented in their companies. Participants' tenure, age and education were measured by single items.

The study suggests that the ability to manage paradoxes increases with age and tenure in a company and at a current position. At the same time economic/business educational background appears to be unsupportive in this regard.

While the issue of managing paradoxes energizes researchers in various disciplines, we still do not know much about antecedents of the process. The study shed light on effects that managers' demographics have on their ability of managing paradoxes. It contributes to the theory on strategic paradoxes as well as theory on the influence of decision-makers' individual characteristics on their decisions.

We study the relationship between firms’ top management teams (TMT) and internationalization complexity. We consider the effect of three different sets of TMT characteristics – international business orientation intensity, education intensity, and team diversity – on three different and increasingly complex facets of internationalization - international markets intensity, international operations intensity and international country diversity. We argue that more international, highly-educated and diverse TMTs are better able to face the complexity derived from international competition. The results of our empirical analysis show that TMTs having foreign managers or managers with international experience are more likely to be in charge of firms facing higher international operations intensity. Conversely, more educated and more diverse TMTs are associated with complexity deriving from international diversification.

This paper aims to describe and explain a contemporary phenomenon.

This is an analysis of research reports and fiction texts.

Universities use mergers and acquisitions to improve their ranking positions, ignoring the effects on research and teaching.

More attention should be paid to current managerial fashions.

An opposition to thoughtless fashion following may lead to positive changes.

If you mean “societal implications”, the state of universities is very important to democratic societies.

These are not for the author to judge.

The time has come to reflect on the warning signs, decisions made, and repercussions of those in leadership of a financial services company which collapsed in the wake of the financial crisis during the mid-2000’s. The author was a divisional technology executive of this firm at the time, close enough to the top of the organization to observe the actions of those in charge. The author’s observations over a period of years eventually led her to resign from her position to enter a doctoral program only a few weeks before the company’s demise. The impetus behind the author’s resignation was her feeling that the decisions and actions of those in leadership violated her personal values. In this account, the author offers her personal reflections and the repercussions of this experience, followed by a deconstruction of this tragic leadership failure which includes references to the leadership literature.